On Wed, 27 Nov 2019, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2019 at 04:00:01PM +0100, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
Hi Daniel, Aaron.
On 11/26/19 3:19 PM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
On Tue, Nov 26, 2019 at 06:14:27PM +0530, aaron.zakh...@gmail.com wrote:
From: Aaron Dominick <aaron.zakh...@gmail.com>
I have removed the botched patches and have got the code working upto the GART
initialization.
I am not sure how to implement the GART. I am guessing it should be an IOMMU
device but I think that is a bit much for an emulated card.
The earlier problem of display probing seems to be resolved by using an R300
bios I got from TechPowerUP's GPU database:
https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/14509/14509
I am NOT sure if we can distribute it in the QEMU source tree. If it
does cause problems I can send a patch to remove it.
That site seems to be a repository of BIOS uploaded by arbitrary users,
with no information on what license terms might apply to the uploads.
We have to therefore assume the worst and treat the BIOS images on that
site as proprietary and not re-distributable, despite the fact that the
site itself is acting as a 3rd party distributor.
We can not redistribute this BIOS.
IOW, we can't have this in QEMU git I'm afraid, unless someone can find
a trustworthy vendor source for the original image with accompanying
license information.
Daniel, I think there is no problem if Aaron contributes a model of the R300
device to QEMU, right? This doesn't involve redistributing any BIOS.
Having just the device impl doesn't cause any legal problems.
It does become a slight usability issue, as any users need to go and find
the suitable BIOS in order to use the device. No downstream OS vendors are
going to be able to distribute this BIOS either
We may be able to avoid this problem if we identify what the driver needs
from the BIOS and implement that in our vgabios. Gerd has already added
some tables that some drivers need in the latest vgabios version that's
currently in git master (but those were for Rage128 and RV100 that ati-vga
currently implements). Aaron, did you try with latest git master and does
that still need a BIOS from a real card or if so do you happen to know
what the driver needs from the BIOS? (It may be some tables/structure or
BIOS calls that the QEMU vgabios-ati does not implement yet.) If that's
not too difficult to add it may be implemented in QEMU's vgabios to avoid
needing proprietary blobs. It could also be EDID access that may use
different registers on R300 but I think that may be simple to fix if more
details are known.
I don't know if we have hit this problem before & if we have any
general policies about it ?
I don't know but this may be similar to boards needing firmware ROMs or
the firmware blobs needed by some Linux kernel drivers. How are those
handled? Distros usually put them in a non-free repo I think.
Regrads,
BALATON Zoltan
